This collection is comprised of poster art from the 1880's up until The Great War from such well known artists as Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Alphonse Mucha, and Jules Cheret. The poster as a form of art is interesting due to its versatile nature and ability to bridge classic painting with more popular forms of artistic representation. The idea of poster art was originally a form of advertisement that later grew into an art form. Art of the Poster 1880-1918 is a group of assorted posters from these trend setters of the impressionist era. There are only 160 posters that were digitized and posted on the site through Lawrence University digital collections library in Wisconsin. The collection was actually digitized out of house by the Visual Resources Library at the Minneapolis College of Art. They scanned the images and afterwards cataloged them.
Collection Principles
I would not consider this collection to be a good one. They use Content DM which works quite well as a platform for displaying their information, but they have very little in the way of actual information on the formation of their collection. You would think that is someone chose this collection as a resource that there would be more to be had from it, other than a general home page and two options for searching. It is a little disappointing considering how beautiful the images are within the collection. I was unable to find any information on the creation of the collection or even the website. I navigated to the actual university hoping to run across some more explicit research or numbers, there was no way of finding it. The only option available was by contacting the librarian at the visual resources library, which just wasn't very practical. I don't know why these images were chosen over others or if they digitized their entire collection and the principles by which the collection was formed.
Object Characteristics
The images themselves are very beautiful and by looking at them I can tell they must of used a decent scanner to create the images. The posters are very vibrant and can be zoomed into about 3 or 4 times. You may magnify up to the very threads in the paper or cloth that the posters were originally printed on. It is pretty great. It must have been time consuming to digitize this collection as some of the posters are quite large and would need a lot of extra time and care to protect them from being ruined by each individual scan. Content DM creates a very search-able database, and it is nice to be able to navigate within it and view each image as I am browsing. I just wish I new at what dpi the images were created at and what types of files each one is associated with. I think that it is safe to assume that the images are all JPEG's, but I am not positive that the institution has created a backup or even scanned the images as TIFF's.
Metadata
The metadata seemed for explicit and accurate to the images that they were describing. I almost wish they were more search-able, more subjects associated with some of the images. In some of the images there is even a translation of the French and then an explanation of what the translation refers to. It is quite nice, you can even search within these sentences for subjects and locate other works with similar meanings. Content DM is very accurate in my opinion. I also like how the metadata is out in the open below the images, you do not need to search for it. I wonder how the collection was organized and if you wanted to, could you ask to see the physical poster. These things are not contained on the website.
Intended Audience
In my opinion the collection is orchestrated for the general public and people who appreciate poster art. I don't think the site is meant to be overly scholarly, yet the images seem very acute to understanding the art better. I just wish there was more information associated with this collection to make it more accessible to a wider set of the population.
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